


Walpurgis Night

by Argyle



Category: Demian - Hermann Hesse
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-15
Updated: 2005-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-20 11:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2426378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argyle/pseuds/Argyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love must have the strength to become certain within itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walpurgis Night

In the minutes which stretched like shadows before sundown, it was not unusual to find Demian standing alone by the riverbank. He held his gaze to the waters: here silver-backed and capped by foam, there murky with the mud and stone of the depths. His reflection was hemmed by reeds and gently flushed roses; my own seemed sky-dappled with sepia. They merged and shifted, flew apart and faded. He smiled.

“Demian.” My voice was scarcely a whisper, but I knew that he had heard. He tossed a gnarled mass of nettle to the ground and turned to face me.

“Hello, Sinclair,” he said. “I am glad you’re here.” He clasped my shoulder, and it was as though we had never parted. The memory of those years of silence seemed to shimmer and ebb in his presence, a phantom to be caught and contemplated just out of the corner of one’s eye. Even as a reminder of my own restlessness, it did not draw away the sanctity of truth, nor did it ease the weight of my longing. He darted the tip of his tongue across his lips. “I’ve been thinking about Faust.”

“Oh?” I asked. The woolen arc of his cuff brushed across the back of my hand with natural familiarity, and he thrust his arm under mine as we began forward. “He was a being of terrible powers.”

“Perhaps.” Demian nodded meditatively. “He was also greedy and presumptuous, but he wasn’t afraid to seek that which lay dormant within himself.”

“Yes.”

“‘Not everybody’s Faust,’ you once said to me,” he continued, raising a hand to silence my objections, “and you were right, in a way. To summon spirits is one thing, and to lose sight of oneself quite another.”

“Do you think he actually lost sight, though? Maybe he just became more nearly himself, like a flower unfolding, or a fledgling hawk learning its gyre.” I spoke not out of past approbations or with the intention of posterity, but rather as a man who assembles the framework of his ideas mid-air. My words were as warm and volatile as newly blown glass, and in feeling the pulse within my chest, the blood which whirled within my ears, I could not attest to being a mere conduit. The interest was too great, and my friend was with me. I unclenched my fists.

“There is only so much that can be learned through books, through tutelage,” he said. “The rest comes of instinct and experience. Faust knew this just as he knew the path which was drawn into his very cells.”

“It was his undoing.”

Demian caught my gaze. His expression was quiet and searching, and when he spoke again, his voice had softened. “You’ve been to see my mother?”

“Yes,” I said, allowing the fondness of my thoughts to seep into my features. “Just a moment ago.” I smiled. I had knocked upon her door, drawing a handkerchief across my brow, and it was she who answered. I imagined that she had been waiting. She smelled of evening primrose, faintly mournful in the waning sunlight, and her hands were warm.

“Sinclair!” She was laughing, but her laughter seemed to almost weep. Her cheeks were speckled by the mist, and her hair was damp and framed with diamonds, dotted with tears. She has been outside, I thought; I might have seen her in the street, might have stood close to her side as she chose fresh poppies over dried lavender at the vendor’s barrow. I might have embraced her and kissed the dew from the fine curve of her lashes. She held my hand as she said, “Sinclair, how good it is to see you today,” and her long, calm fingers wove through my own.

“Yes,” I replied. We stood together in the parlor. The sun poured through the high window, catching against the blanched faces of the walls in long, scythed sweeps; white motes danced through the air. I felt suddenly alight. It seemed then that I was dreaming, that I walked within the tapered halls of thought with the full foresight of admittance and realization. There was a sudden pinch of anxiety in my chest, and I struggled to keep my balance as I looked about me. Yes, of course. I had walked within these halls for years, had oft strayed from the gaze of a master. Only here did I not feel alone. I saw the worn tiles of the floor, the thick weave of the curtains; I saw my painting, long deemed lost, and felt a hand atop my shoulder. A new image rose up before me, that of man and woman, spark and clay, and I understood. I was not dreaming.

Frau Eva nodded. “Do not worry, Sinclair.” She smiled sadly, and with what knowledge and solidity of opinion did her mouth come to take its shape, I did not know. “There will be time enough for each of us.”

“Time?” I asked. “What can you mean?”

Although she did not answer, I at once felt that there was a secret to be held between the two of us, a talisman whose great glimmering stone would come to shine through the darkest corners of the hour. It was an emerald encased in shadow, a lapis held in smoke, and my desire seemed unquenchable.

“Max is outside,” she said. She had straightened her shoulders and regained her bearing as she led me towards the door. “Go to him: he is waiting.”

And so he was.

“Tell me, Sinclair,” he presently said. We had paused in our steps some moments ago, and Demian stood so close that I imagined I could feel the steady touch of his breath against my cheek. “Do you think it was the potential for knowledge or the knowledge itself that led to Faust’s fall?”

“I do not know.” Nor, in that moment, did I wish to, so mighty was Demian’s presence. My mind retraced our time in school together, our first meetings and the incident with Kromer, but as Demian’s fingertips brushed against my brow, the prospect of such things seemed as distant as the moon. “Perhaps, for him, they were the same.”

“Yes,” he said. His eyes gleamed. They seemed to exist on a wholly different plane than the rest of his face. The brown fringe of his hair was soft to the touch; I knew this. His lips were curled and perhaps faintly cruel, but also wide and expressive, always on the cusp of decision as each revelation and private thought passed into the frame of his memory or was gifted with its own irreplaceable timbre and lilt. Once voiced, an idea bloomed with the metallic wings of a wind-borne spectre. I could see them beneath my lashes, bright patches of phosphorescence which flew forth when the light was trapped and transformed between the splinters of afternoon and night.

Demian was silent, and his eyes were those of my dream-bird.

It was more than just a trick of the light, more than a twist of the mind in which a picture is at once a chalice and the poised profiles of two lovers. As we lay together in the inky side of dusk, each edge was softened, and the shadows seemed more blue than black.


End file.
